Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (27 page)

Soltyk liked his soul to be marked with little delicate wounds and wistfulnesses: he enjoyed an understanding, a little melancholy, with a woman: they would just divine in each other possibilities of passion, that was yet too ‘lasse’ and sad to rise to the winding of Love’s horns
*
that were heard, nevertheless, in a décor Versaillesque and polonais.
*
They were people who looked forward as others look back: they would say farewell to the future as most men gaze upon the past. At the most they played the slight dawning and disappearing of passion, cutting, fastidiously, all the rest of the piece. So he was often found with women. But for Anastasya, Soltyk was one of her many impresarios, who helped her on to and off the scene of Life. He bored her completely, they had something equivalent to pleasant business relations: she had recognized at once his merits as an impresario. There could not therefore have been less material for passion: even Kreisler was nonplussed. He was surrounded by unresponsive shapes.

Conventional figures of drama lacked: Kreisler had in fact got into the wrong company. But he conformed for the sake of the Invisible Audience haunting life: he emulated the matter-of-factness and aplomb that impressed him in the others: so far indeed was he successful in this that the Audience took some time to notice him—the vein of scandal running through an otherwise dull performance.

In the conservatory he dug himself in by a cleverly arranged breastwork of chairs. From thence he issued forth on various errands. All his errands showed the gusto of the logic of his personality: he might indeed have been enjoying himself. He invented outrage that was natural to him, and enjoyed slightly the licence and scope of his indifference.

At the first sortie he observed a rather congested, flushed and spectacled young woman, her features set in a spasm of duty. It was a hungry sex in charge of a flustered automaton. Having picked her for a partner, he gained her confidence by his scrupulous german politeness. But he soon got to work. While marking time in a crush, he disengaged his hand and appeared to wish to alter the lie of her bosom, very apologetically and holding her tight with the other hand.

‘Excuse me! it’s awkward—. More to the left—so! Clumsy things and some women are so proud of them! (No: I’m sure you’re not!) No. Allow me. Let it hang to the left!’ The young lady, very red, and snorting almost in his face, escaped brusquely from his clutch and fled towards her nearest friends.

Several young women, and notably a flapper, radiant with heavy inexperience and loaded with bristling bronze curls, he lured into the conservatory. They all came out with scarlet faces: but that did not prevent others from following him in.

For the first hour he paid no attention to Anastasya: he prosecuted his antics as though he had forgotten all about her. He knew she was there and left her alone, even in thought; he hid coquettishly behind his solemn laughter-in-action, the pleasant veil of his hysteria, Anastasya was no longer of the least importance: he had realized that she had been all along a mere survival of days when such individuals mattered. Now he was
en pleine abstraction
*
—a very stormy and concrete nothingness.

At length he became generally noticed in the room, although there were a great many people present. The last flapper had screamed and
had escaped at the gallop. He had even been observed for a moment, an uncouth faun,
*
in pursuit, in the flowery mouth of the conservatory. Fräulein Liepmann hesitated now. She thought at length that he was insane. In speaking to him and getting him removed if necessary, a scandalous scene was almost certain to occur.

Again the tall, and in spite of the studied dishevelment, still preternaturally ‘correct,’ satyric
*
form appeared upon the threshold of the conservatory.—An expectant tremor invaded several backs. But on this occasion he just stalked round on a tour of inspection, as though to see that all was going along as it should. Heavily and significantly he stared at those young ladies who had been his partners, when he came across them: one he abruptly stopped in front of and gazed at severely. She did not denounce him but blushed and even tittered. He left this exhibition of cynicism in disgust, and returned to his conservatory.

In his deck chair, his head stretched back, glasses horizontal and facing the ceiling, he considered the graceless Hamlet that he was.

‘Go to a nunnery, Widow!’

He should have been saying that to his Ophelia. He hiccuped. Why did he not
go to her
?—contact was the essential thing: his thoughts returned to Anastasya. He must bare her soul. If he could insult her enough she would be bare-souled. There would be the naked
weibliche Seele
.
*
Then he would spit on it. Soltyk however offered a conventional target for violence: Soltyk was evading him with his indifference. Soltyk! What should be done with Soltyk? Why (a prolonged and stormily rising ‘why’), there was no difficulty about
that
. He got up from his chair, and walked deliberately and quickly into the central room gazing fiercely to right and left. But Soltyk was nowhere to be seen.

The dancers were circling rapidly past with athletic elation, talking in the way people do when they are working. Their intelligences floated and flew above the waves of these graceful exercises, but with frequent drenchings, as it were. Each new pair of dancers seemed coming straight for him: their voices were loud, a hole was cut out of the general noise, as it were opening a passage into it. The two or three instruments behind the screen of palms produced the necessary measures to keep this throng of people careering, like the spoon stirring in a saucepan: it stirred and stirred and they jerked and huddled
insipidly round and round, in sluggish currents with small eddies here and there.

Kreisler was drawn up short at the first door and had to flatten himself against the wall for a moment. He was just advancing again to work his way round to the next exit when he caught sight of Anastasya dancing with (he supposed) some Englishman. He stopped, paralysed by her appearance: the part she had played in present events gave her a great prestige in his image-life: when in the flesh she burst into his dream she still was able to disturb everything for a moment. Now he stood like somebody surprised in a questionable act. The next moment he was furious at this interference. She and her partner stood in his way: he took her partner roughly by the arm, pushing him against her, hustling him, fixing him with his eye. He passed beyond them then, through the passage he had made. The young man handled in this manner, shy and unprompt, stared after Kreisler with a ‘What the devil!’—People are seldom rude in England. Kreisler, without apology, but as if waiting for more vigorous expostulation, was also looking back, while he stepped slowly along the wall towards the door beyond—the one leading to the refreshment room.

Anastasya freed herself at once from her partner, and pale and frowning (but as though waiting) was looking after Kreisler curiously. She would have liked him to stop. He had done something strange and was as suddenly going away. That was unsatisfactory. They looked at each other without getting any farther, he showed no sign of stopping: she continued to stare. She burst out laughing. They had clashed (like people in the dance). The
contact
had been brought about. He was still as surprised at his action as she was. Anastasya felt too, in what way this had been
contact
: she felt his hand on her arm as though it had been she he had seized. Something difficult to understand and which should have been alarming, the sensation of the first tugs of the maelstrom he was producing and conducting all by himself which required her for its heart she had experienced: and then laughed, necessarily; once one was in that atmosphere, like laughing gas with its gusty tickling, it could not be helped.

Now this rough figure of comic mystery disappeared in the doorway, incapable of explaining anything. She shivered nervously as she grasped her partner’s arm again, at this merely physical contact. ‘What’s the matter with that chap?’—her partner asked, conscious of
the lameness of this question. Elsewhere Kreisler was now a subject of conversation. ‘Herr Kreisler is behaving very strangely. Do you think he’s been drinking?’ Fräulein Liepmann asked Eckhart.

Eckhart was a little drunk himself: he took a very decided view of Kreisler’s case.

‘Comme toute la Pologne!
*
as drunk as the whole of Poland!’ he affirmed. He only gave it as an opinion, with no sign of particular indignation: he was beaming with greedy generosity at his Great Amoureuse.

‘Ah! here he comes again!’ said Fräulein Liepmann at the door.

So Kreisler disappeared in the doorway after the ‘contact’; he passed through the refreshment room. In a small chamber beyond he sat down by an open window.

When Anastasya had laughed Kreisler’s inner life had for a moment been violently disturbed. He could not respond, or retaliate, the door being in front of him he vanished, as Mephistopheles
*
might sink with suddenness into the floor at the receipt of some affront, to some sulphurous regions beneath, in a second—come to a stop alone, upright—stick his fingers in his mouth nearly biting them in two, his eyes staring: so stand stock-still, breathless and haggard for some minutes: then shoot up again, head foremost, in some other direction, like some darting and skulking fish, to the face of the earth. Kreisler sat on staring in front of him, quite forgetful where he was and how long he had sat there, in the midst of a hot riot of thoughts.

Suddenly he sat up and looked about him like a man who has been asleep for whom work is waiting; with certain hesitation he rose and again made for the door. Glancing reflectively and solemnly about he perceived the widow talking to a little reddish Englishman. He bore down upon them with courtly chicken-like undulations.

‘May I take the widow away for a little?’ he asked her companion.

(He always addressed her as ‘Widow’: all he said to her began with a solemn ‘Widow!’ occasionally alternating with ‘
Derelict!
’ All uttered in a jumbled tongue, it lost most of its significance.)

On being addressed the small Briton gave the britannic equivalent of a jump—a sudden moving of his body and shuffling of his feet, still looking at the floor, where he had cast his eyes as Kreisler approached.

‘What? I—.’

‘Widow! permit me—’ Kreisler said and encircled her with a heavy arm.

Manipulating her with a leisurely gusto, he circled into the dance.

The band was playing the ‘Merry Widow’ waltz.
*

‘
Merry
Widow!’ he said smilingly to his partner. ‘Yes!’ shaking his head at her roguishly: ‘
merry
Widow!’

The music fumbled in a confused mass of memory, all it managed to bring to light was a small cheap photograph, taken at a Bauern Ball,
*
with a flat german student’s cap. He saw this solemn lad with pity, this early Otto. Their hostess also was dancing: Kreisler remarked her with a wink of recognition. Dancing very slowly, mournfully even, he and his partner bumped into her each time as they passed: each time it was a deliberate collision. Thud went the massive buffers of the two ladies. The widow felt the impact, but it was only at the third round that she perceived the method presiding at these bumps. She then realized that they were without fail about to collide with the other lady once more: the collision could not be avoided, but she shrank away, made herself as small as possible, bumped gently and apologized over her shoulder, with a smile and screwing up of the eyes, full of dumb worldly significance. At the fourth turn of the room, however, Kreisler having increased her speed sensibly, she was on her guard. In fact she had already suggested that she should be taken back to her seat. He pretended to be giving their hostess a wide berth this time; then suddenly and gently he swerved and bore down upon her. The widow frantically veered, took a false step, tripped over her dress of state, tearing it in several places, and fell to the ground. They caused a circular undulating commotion throughout the neighbouring dancers, like a stone falling in a pond.

Several people bent down to help Mrs. Bevelage. Kreisler’s assistance was angrily dispensed with, the widow was roused at last: she scrambled to her feet and limped to the nearest chair, followed by a group of sympathizers.

‘Who is he?’

‘He’s drunk.’

‘What happened?’

‘He ought to be turned out!’ people exclaimed who had witnessed the accident.

With great dignity Herr Otto Kreisler regained the conservatory. As he lay stretched in his chair Fräulein Liepmann, alone, appeared before him and said in a tight, breaking voice,

‘I think Herr Kreisler you would do well now, as you have done nothing all evening but render yourself objectionable, to relieve us of your company.’

He sat up frowning.

‘I don’t understand you!’

‘I suppose you’re drunk. I hope so, for—.’

‘You hope I’m drunk, Fräulein?’ he asked in an astonished voice.

He reclined at full length again.

‘A lady I was dancing with fell over’ he remarked ‘owing entirely to her own clumsiness and intractability.—But perhaps she was drunk, I never thought of that. Of course that explains it.’

‘So you’re not going?’

‘Certainly Fräulein—when you go! We’ll go together.’

‘Schurke!’ Hurling hotly this epithet at him—her breath had risen many degrees in temperature at its passage, and her breast heaved in dashing it out (as though, in fact, the word ‘Schurke’ had been the living thing, and she were emptying her breast of it violently)—she left the room. His last exploit had been accomplished in a half-disillusioned condition. The evening had been a failure from his point of view. Everything had conspired to cheat him of the violent relief he required; his farcing proceeded because he could think of nothing else to do. Anastasya laughing had disorganized ‘imaginary life’ at a promising juncture. He told himself now without conviction that he
hated
her. ‘Ich hasse dich! Ich hasse dich!’ he hissed over to himself, enjoying the wind of the ‘hasse’ in his moustaches but otherwise not very impressed. His sensuality had been somewhat stirred: he wanted to
kiss
her now: he must get his mouth on hers he told himself juicily and fiercely; he must revel in the laugh, where it grew! She was a fatal woman: she was in fact evidently
the Devil
.